The Children of Chinatown

Growing Up Chinese American in San Francisco, 1850-1920

Wendy Rouse Jorae

Publication Year: 2009

Wendy Jorae challenges long-held notions of early Chinatown as a bachelor community by showing that families--and particularly children--played important roles in its daily life. She explores the wide-ranging images of Chinatown's youth created by competing interests with their own agendas--from anti-immigrant depictions of Chinese children as filthy and culturally inferior to exotic and Orientalized images that catered to the tourist's ideal of Chinatown. All of these representations, Jorae notes, tended to further isolate Chinatown at a time when American-born Chinese children were attempting to define themselves as Chinese American. Facing barriers of immigration exclusion, cultural dislocation, child labor, segregated schooling, crime, and violence, Chinese American children attempted to build a world for themselves on the margins of two cultures. Their story is part of the larger American story of the struggle to overcome racism and realize the ideal of equality.

When one imagines San Francisco’s nineteenth-century Chinatown, Chinese
children do not usually figure prominently in the picture. Scholars of Chinese
American history have focused primarily on the story of male Chinese immigrants;
only within the last two decades...

CHAPTER 1: The Immigration of Chinese Children and the Chinese Question

Lee Him arrived in San Francisco on the Steamer Rio De Janeiro on January 7,
1888.1 The boy was only one of thousands of Chinese children who had
passed through the port of San Francisco since the 1850s. Immigrants arriving
from China in the 1850s and 1860s...

CHAPTER 2: Recentering the Chinese Family in Early Chinese American History

Zona Gale, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1903, described her visit
to the home of Foo Tai, a Christian Chinese woman and president of the
Woman’s Society of the Baptist Mission. Curiosity about the home life of
Christianized Chinese prompted Gale’s visit...

CHAPTER 3: For the Family Back Home: Chinese Children at Work

San Francisco journalist and photographer Louis Stellman frequented Chinatown
in the early twentieth century and attempted to capture images of daily
life among its inhabitants. One of his photographs shows a young girl walking
down the road carrying two pails of dried shrimp...

CHAPTER 4: Challenging Segregation: Chinese Children at School

Ah Beng was a student at the Presbyterian mission school in 1886 and his
reference to the Bible and Jesus in this letter reflected the Christian emphasis
of his education. At first glance, Ah Beng’s letter, written at the request of his
schoolteacher, appears as a child’s simple...

CHAPTER 5: Articles of Contention: Chinese Children in the Missions and Courts

Sensational articles about urban vice were common journalistic fare in
American newspapers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
and San Francisco’s newspapers were no exception. Tales of white
slavery, detailing the sexual exploitation of women...

CHAPTER 6: Children of the New Chinatown

In a 1902 article in the San Francisco Chronicle titled ‘‘How to Show Your
Eastern Cousins through Chinatown,’’ the reporter painted contrasting images
of the children in Chinatown, beginning with a description of the
following scene at Fish Alley...

CONCLUSION: Constructing the Future

This book chronicles the various ways that the children of early Chinatown
found themselves caught in political and societal battles over immigration
restriction, segregation, cultural identity, crime and violence, child labor, and
other momentous personal and communal crises...

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.